I stumbled upon this book after a difficult breakup, when I felt like I needed to find out where I went wrong and how to do better next time. It’s a book about attraction on the surface, but it’s really a crash course on emotional self-improvement—how to live, communicate, and establish relationships authentically.

Although some of the ideas are obvious to anyone with a shred of life experience, seeing it all laid out in writing helped me evaluate where I’m strong and where I fall short. I learned to think about friendships and relationships differently, as an intentional part of life rather than happenstance. There’s far more to the book than these bullet points but these are the parts that resonated with me most.

Main ideas

• Relationships are inherently emotional. We need a strong emotional foundation (identity, self-awareness, and self-esteem) before we can look outwards.

  • The single common thread between everyone he’s worked with is a lack of awareness of his own emotional motivators, or an inability to express his emotions freely with those around him.
• We drive behavioral changes by creating internal change. Surface-level behaviors (”performances” like pickup lines, flirting) don’t land without the proper mindset and intentions underneath them.

• When communicating, what you say doesn’t matter; why you say it matters.

  • Stop looking at communication as the surface information and instead, pay attention to the emotions and motivations behind everything that you do and say. That’s where all the meaning is.
• Imagine a 3-way Venn diagram: outward behaviors (giving a compliment, holding their hand), underlying motivations and emotions (genuinely wanting to know someone), and social norms (being respectful and not moving too quickly). Emotional connections happen when all three are aligned.

Emotional Theory

• Neediness is when you need others to validate yourself and prioritize others’ motivations and desires. Non-neediness (self-security) is when you don’t need the validation of others and prioritize your own motivations and desires.

  • Neediness is a primary motivator for, and comes through in, all the behaviors in your life.
  • The less needy you are, the more attractive you are.

• Vulnerability is putting yourself on the line emotionally and exposing yourself to rejection in some way. Being in tune with your emotions, and expressing them.

  • Non-needy men are comfortable with vulnerability.
  • To become vulnerable, and to overcome avoidance, you must share yourself with others. It forces you to accept those truths, and also shows you that being weak, embarrassed isn’t the end of the world. As with learning anything, there’s a pain period required to get to the point of truly being vulnerable.

• Vulnerability requires truth: expressing your thoughts and feelings as they come to you, without inhibition, without shame, and unconditionally (expecting nothing in return).

  • True honesty is only possible when it is unconditional.

  • Non-neediness is also crucial, because if you immediately “fall in love” with every woman you see, and tell her honestly that you need her approval, that will be off-putting.

    • Human nature is such that we don’t trust people who like us if we don’t feel as though we earned it somehow.

Honest living

• An honest life, where you do the things you genuinely want to do, express yourself the way you genuinely feel, and live as authentically to yourself as possible, is how you develop self-confidence (non-neediness) and find rewarding relationships.

  • “Developing an attractive lifestyle is a long-term process. It requires a consistent and penetrating look at your actions, your habits and what you’ve chosen to do with most of your time. Your job, your hobbies, your friends, your interests, are these things mostly a result of what was told to you or pushed on you, or are they things that you consciously evaluated and chose based on how enriching and passionate they made you feel? These are important questions. No one can live your life but you. And as long as you sleepwalk through life not ever questioning or evaluating the lifestyle you’ve built for yourself, the same behavioral patterns are likely to creep up over and over again.”